OBIT: Jorge Oteiza, sculptor, poet, 94
Hyfler/Rosner
Jorge Oteiza, one of the greatest Spanish artists of the 20th century, died
of pneumonia, aged 94, in hospital in San Sebastián. Oteiza was best known
for his "metaphysical" boxes and empty spheres in stone. He wrote dozens of
essays on space and emptiness, as well as poetry. He said: "Artists are dead
people who try to return to life via poetry."
Oteiza turned to art after studying medicine. His collection, which he gave
to the Navarra region in northern Spain, has been shown around the world.
Hyfler/Rosner
Jorge Oteiza
Sculptor obsessed with empty space
10 April 2003
Jorge Oteiza Embil, sculptor and writer: born Orio, Spain 21 October
1908; married 1938 Itziar Carreño Etxeandia (died 1991); died San Sebastián,
Spain 9 April 2003.
The Basque language has a word, "huts", expressing something that obsessed
Jorge Oteiza, one of the greatest Spanish sculptors of the 20th century.
Huts means a vacuum, the absence of something yearned for; a flaw, a
hollowing-out.
Oteiza made sculptures to frame empty spaces, having decided that sculpture
was not about the shapes of things but about the spaces within and around
them. Although he formally abandoned his artistic discipline in 1959, he is
now winning wider recognition as a figure to be ranked with Eduardo
Chillida, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.
In 1950 Oteiza and the architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza were chosen
to design a new Aránzazu Basilica for the Franciscan community in Guipúzcoa.
It was a turning point in the careers of many of those involved, and in the
history of church design. Oteiza described the commission as "the happiest
day of my miserable life" - but it generated enormous controversy, mostly
around Oteiza's frieze of the Apostles above the main entrance.
The influence of Henry Moore is evident in the Apostles. There are 14 -
Oteiza included both the repentant Judas and his successor, Matthias - but
what left conservative churchmen aghast was that each figure has a gaping
hole in its body. Oteiza explained: "They gave their hearts for others, and
this self-sacrifice gives them their common sanctity and their true
Christian identity." It was too much for the visiting pontifical
commissioner, one Monsignor Constantini, to whom it was "a row of monks with
their guts torn out".
Clerical fire and brimstone paralysed the project for years. It took Pope
Paul VI to call the reactionaries off and sanction the completion of the
basilica, so it was 1969 before Aránzazu was finished. The daunting building
represents the finest Basque talents of the era.
Another work that speaks volumes about Oteiza's stubborn, combative
character is entitled, in Basque, Hau Madrilentzat ("This is for Madrid",
1975). It is a stylised version of the elbow-grasping, fist-shaking gesture
known in Spanish as a corte de mangas. The title was Oteiza's blunt message
to the capital city after it reneged on a contract he had won for the Plaza
Colón.
Born in Orio, in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, in 1908, Oteiza went to
school in the Basque country and in Navarra, his father's homeland. He was
an introverted, solitary boy. After their business collapsed, the family
moved to Madrid and, when Jorge's father emigrated to Argentina, Jorge
worked as a waiter and typesetter to support his mother and five younger
siblings while he studied for a medical degree.
The scientific elements of his studies awakened interests in structures,
energies and the representation of the invisible. He turned to sculpture and
was already picking up awards by his early twenties. That makes Jorge Oteiza
the last survivor of the artistic vanguard that predated the Spanish
Republic.
In 1935, Oteiza embarked for South America, and for 15 years wandered around
many countries - staging shows of sculptures and ceramics, teaching and
writing on the philosophy and history of art. Returning to Spain in 1948, he
became a leading light in his generation of Basque artists. He won the
National Prize for Architecture for a chapel on the pilgrimage path to
Santiago, and produced landmark pieces for university buildings, an
aluminium statue for the Dominican church at Valladolid, even a façade for
the Madrid Institute of Artificial Insemination. Between exhibitions and
lectures, and a day job at an electrical ceramics firm, he wrote about Goya,
South American megalithic statuary and in defence of abstraction.
Oteiza's will to explore sculpture to its limits reached its most fruitful
expression in the late 1950s with his Propósito experimental ("Exploratory
Effort"). His international standing was sealed when a set of these small
sculptures won at the São Paulo Bienal in 1957.
Two years later, Oteiza announced that he was finished with full-scale
sculpture. He turned to the written word, claiming to have explored the
properties of space so extensively that "I ended up with a purely receptive
empty space, without a sculpture in my hands".
He had stored up so many projects and models, however, that even during his
most prolific period as a writer, polemicist and poet, new sculptures
emerged. In 1963, his key literary work appeared. Quousque tandem . . . !
("Is This Where We Have Reached?"), subtitled "An Effort to Interpret the
Aesthetics of the Basque Soul", had a profound impact.
Oteiza's other projects of the 1960s encompassed aspects of the Basque
cultural renaissance he had pursued since his youth. Ventures into
film-making, proposals to create museums or research institutes in
aesthetics, prehistory, anthropology and architecture, a university of the
arts and a Basque-language "children's university' were crammed into a few
years, along with his involvement in the art groups Gaur ("Today"), Emen
("Here") and Orain ("Now").
A falling-out between Chillida and Oteiza frustrated the emergence of what
might properly be called a Basque School. One issue between them was
Chillida's work as an illustrator for the philosopher Martin Heidegger's Die
Kunst und der Raum ("Art and Space"): Oteiza felt he had a better grasp of
Heidegger's meaning. A 30-year feud ensued, with Oteiza the main mover.
There was widespread relief in 1997 when Oteiza swallowed enough pride to
visit Chillida for an embrace of reconciliation.
A profound spirituality informs most of Oteiza's work. He could articulate a
humanistic form of Christianity or, with equal lucidity, proclaim himself "a
devout atheist". But his relationship with the Catholic Church was erratic.
In the early 1960s, Oteiza suggested to a few friends getting a small plane,
flying to Rome and dive-bombing St Peter's while the Vatican Council was in
session. The deranged plot was taking definite shape by the time Oteiza lost
interest in it: like some of his much sounder enterprises, it came to
nothing.
Perhaps it is as well that he did not dedicate himself to politics. He did,
however, take a public stand against Francoist repression, as one of the
artists fronting the Gernika 70 campaign supporting the 16 defendants in the
notorious Burgos Trial. In the first democratic elections of 1977, Oteiza
was a Senate candidate for the Basque Left. He considered donating his
artistic legacy to the Basque community, but fell out with the region's
Nationalist Party. By 1992, he had resolved to give everything to the people
of Navarra, with an Oteiza Museum to be created alongside his ancient
farmhouse at Alzuza, near Pamplona.
An unseemly controversy has dogged the museum project, with a crisis
emerging in the foundation created to run it. Its board split between
friends of Oteiza and allies of the Navarra government and, at one point,
Oteiza said he no longer wanted the museum to bear his name. This may take
years to resolve.
In 1938, Oteiza married Itziar Carreño. She died in 1991 and, for the past
decade, a tomb in Alzuza cemetery has been marked by two crosses, bearing
the names Itziar Carreño and Jorge Oteiza. In his last decades, the artist
liked to disarm interviewers by exclaiming: "Jorge Oteiza? That fellow died
years ago." In a more thoughtful mood, he remarked: "We all work to cure
ourselves of death, but death ends up curing you of life."